Fairy Tales
by Nikitangel
Summary: What if Salvage had ended differently?


**Title**: Fairy Tales

**Author**: nikitangel

**Rating**: PG-13 for language

**Genre**: Angst

**Pairing**: Wes/Faith

**Word Count**: 1,272

**Written For**: enfaith, for the long, long ago Wes/Faith Ficathon

**Thanks to**: theantijoss, who kindly betaed it for me many moons ago

**Request**: Anya, Dawn, something post-apocolypic preferred

Wes says that it didn't always go down that way.

Which is a totally dumb thing to say, because things only go down one way, no "always" about it. I try to tell him that every time he starts muttering about alternate realities and better worlds, butterfly effects and the way stress slows neuron firing and how that affects reaction time or whatever, but he just gets that batshit crazy look in his eyes and starts going on and on about Orpheus and glass jars and sunlight and Willow.

I have to stop him then, because Dawn always freaks when anyone mentions Willow or Buffy, and I'm damn tired of fighting to calm her down again. Not my job. My job is keeping her alive.

Talking about sunlight is just as bad. We all remember the sun, of course. It hasn't been _that_ many years, for God's sake. As if God had anything to do with this.

It's just kind of the rule that no one mentions it – or them. Rules, manners, all that shit you'd think Wes, of all people, would get. Manners don't count for much anymore, but sometimes they're worth it, if it means not getting that fucking pain in your chest. Sometimes manners and tradition are the only rules left, the only sense in all of this, the only way to dig your claws into sanity and not start to remember all the shit that's happened since the world ended. All the dead people and dusted vamps and...

Things can only go down one way. Belly-achin' about it? Does shit to change it.

Slaying helps get rid of some of that pain, but Wes doesn't like me going out much. Says we should conserve calories and fight only to defend ourselves and our territory. Says a lot of stuff about defense and survival, like I'm some dumb kid or something who has no idea what's going on. I don't need lectures on natural selection – I've seen enough "only the strong survive" shit to last me a billion frickin' lifetimes. He's in charge, fine, better him than me, but he'd better remember who's the Slayer in the house, that's all I'm saying.

Not really a house, I guess. More like a mansion in the middle of nowhere. Place was empty, some retreat thing with a bunch of food stored away. Worked for me and no one had the energy to argue at that point anyway. Bored rich people used to come out here and pretend they were "living off the land." Apparently, "living off the land" means playing with camping shit all day and going back to your 5-star room at night.

It's weird, though, starting a fire to eat your rationed can of soup and then sleeping on 340-count Egyptian cotton. That's what Wes says it is anyways, and I guess he would know about that kind of stuff.

So we're basically cavemen with really nice shit that means nothing to anyone anymore. Least we're alive, and we got food, water and shelter. Most survivors don't. We find them sometimes, when we've hunted too much in one place and we have to go out farther than usual. They run before we can say anything. Dawn pounced on the clothes we brought back from the last group. Says they had a teen-aged girl. She went off on me for letting them get away. Why the hell she'd want to share our rations with someone else is beyond me.

Wes doesn't talk much at night anymore, but he told me about those sheets, whispered in the dark about England and fancy hotels and Watcher stuff. He doesn't call himself a Watcher anymore, either. Which is just as well, because all he's watching is the end of the human race they were all trained to protect.

We were all trained to protect.

That night's when he first told me that stuff about dimensions. Lights out, sweaty skin, hearts slowing, his hand on my arm. He likes the muscles there, thinks it's interesting that I still have them when everyone else just gets weaker and thinner. I could see the rigid line of his collarbone in the moonlight as he talked about high tea and Evian And Crabtree soap or something.

I don't think the others see how skinny he's getting. He wears a lot of layers and shit, but I can tell at night, even in the dark. I've given up trying to convince him to take more of the rations. It's just like him. Totally his own worst enemy and all that other stuff he used to spout at me back in the day. Like he's the only one who would suffer if he kicked it. Not that _I'd_ care, but it'd cause a whole thing. I mean, obviously he doesn't think the freaky thing we have going is worth hanging on for. All those looks and touching my arm at dinner and everything is just some act for the masses or something. If he's gonna starve himself to death just so some weak straggler who totally doesn't do a tenth of what Wes does every day gets another can of beans, it's no business of mine.

He gave me a necklace last week. Really old, of course, all the shiny gone, but that kinda matches the world now, so it works. Some random find on the last hunt. It was pretty plain, but it had this little sun charm thing hanging off it. I told him some demon would probably use it to choke me in my next fight, but I'd wear it anyway, just to show him. He just smiled like he does and said that he wished he'd got me a necklace like this in that other world.

It's not like I believe any of it – that things could have been so different if we'd changed just one small thing. Like I said, things are the way they are. All the prophecies and research and meditation in the world won't change that. He wants to believe there's some shiny-happy reality out there where we won and they lost, that's fine – we all got our delusions. I just wish he'd shut up about it around the SunnyD crowd.

Crowd. I guess there's supposed to be three to make a crowd, isn't there? We're down to two. We started with three. I never thought Dawn would start talking again after we lost Xander in the M'zarik attack a couple years ago. Anya never really stops talking. Every freaking thing she thinks, she's gotta share. Most of the time, she doesn't even notice that nobody's listening.

It's just us left from L.A.

From what we've heard, things went down in Sunnydale pretty much the same way, only a few weeks later. B finally lost. Xander said it was saving Dawn -- as usual.

It's like I keep saying to Wes – the world sucks everywhere, whether he likes it or not.

Sometimes I let him go on, though. He's got this whole fairy tale where he and I cooked up a plan to save Angel and kill the Beast and bring back the sun. He always talks about how we got the sun back. I think that's his favorite part.

Last time Anya and I were on watch alone together, I asked her about it, real casual. She went off on this whole thing about dimensions and shrimp and somebody making wishes. So much like Wes, down to that fire in her eyes, that it freaked me right out. I asked her who would wish for this.

She didn't answer.


End file.
